Words by Ann-Kathrin Riedl

MARRY ME, DEAR DAVID? Behind OONA’s Surveillance Love Story

Who says you can't fall in love with someone who's watching you? On October 16, artist OONA will stage a wedding to David, a surveillance officer she has never met, in London. The performance marks the final chapter of her seven-year art series, built around CCTV footage, handwritten letters and the uneasy intimacy of being watched. What began as an investigation into surveillance, consent and ownership of our images has taken an unexpectedly personal turn. Ahead of the ceremony, we spoke to OONA about falling for the system you're trying to expose, the strange romance of surveillance and why a wedding might be the perfect ending to this unusual love story.

Ann-Kathrin Riedl: OONA, when we last spoke about Dear David, the story was still unfolding. Now, seven years after your first email, you’re getting married. How did the idea of a wedding come about?

OONA: Marriage is how every love story ends. Plus, all my friends are getting married. Why shouldn’t I?

David is a ‘real’ man. He exists. But David in the series is also a proxy for the surveillance state; he is an effigy of surveillance networks. The wedding is as much about my relationship with David (one man, with one set of eyes) as it is about my relationship with surveillance systems at large (many men, many cameras). Marriage seemed a humorous way to confront the reality that we are in a lifelong relationship with surveillance networks and the humans on the other side of these machines, whether we know them by name or not.

Marriage is also the original contract that presumes your consent. Dear David is about consent: who gets to look and who gets looked at. Carole Pateman argues the social contract rests on a sexual contract, and I wanted to stage that tension between the personal and the political: the murkiness of consent in the surveillance state. There won’t be any consummation at the wedding performance, though.

 

A wedding usually marks the beginning of something, but yours will be the final chapter of Dear David. Does it feel more like a marriage or a break-up?

Divorce isn’t allowed in the surveillance state, so break-up is off the table. It’s impossible to get around London without the tube, and there are more than 15,000 CCTV cameras down there, plus AI facial recognition and algorithms watching our every move. Want to move around London? You must submit to state surveillance. Every public space is inseparable from the network of cameras and algorithms tracking it.

Surveillance used to live in the public domain. Now it’s crept into our private spheres. We invite it into our homes, even into our beds late at night, when we think we’re alone on our phones.



I guess David is going to have to get comfortable with an open marriage.

You’ve lived with this project – and with David – for seven years. How does it feel to know that it is actually coming to an end? Do you think there will be a sense of loss afterwards?

I had no idea when I began requesting my footage back in 2019 that it would evolve into this series. The truth is I had no idea what I was doing; I just did it. Requesting your own footage is a legal right in the UK, but I came to see it as surveillance of sorts: Steve Mann’s idea of watching the watchers, except the tool is a subject access request.

So yes, I think I’ll be sad. But it’s far from the last curtain call, because in many ways this body of work will never end. It’s permanently stored on the Tezos blockchain, which is a core component of this series. The state’s gaze runs one way: it sees everything and shows us nothing, and my footage is supposed to be private. The blockchain is the opposite: a public ledger that anyone can read and no one can delete. I’ve done that a lot in my practice: cementing things that are supposed to be private on the most public ledger in the world, from my medical records to my surveillance footage. I think this series will really mark a moment in time, from the quality of the cameras to the sophistication of the tracking algorithms to the subject access requests. The wedding ends the series, not the record.

I really have to thank Anika Meier. I remember after seeing the first letter, she said to me something along the lines of

‘You have something here. Go deeper. Be patient. Let it develop.’

I usually go headfirst into ideas like dynamite and then move on. David is the longest relationship I’ve had within my artistic practice as well. This series is meaningful to me on many levels.

Looking back now, what were the different stages of your relationship with David? At what point did David stop being simply the man sending you your CCTV footage and become ‘David’ – someone you actually cared about?

A lot of people think OONA is a bitch, and I can be. But for the most part, I really like people. And from the moment we started emailing, I always liked David.

There was a point where I stopped seeing David as the apparatus for invasive state surveillance, because he’s just too sweet in his emails. The sincerity of his LinkedIn profile… A kind and innocent fishmonger turned civil servant, married with kids.

And that’s the trap. How do you stay critical of a system when the person operating it is kind to you? Lauren Berlant calls it cruel optimism: attachment to the very thing that limits you. I got attached, maybe even anxiously?



You began the project thinking about surveillance, visibility, consent and ownership of your image. Did you find any answers?

I don’t think this work has answers, and I’m not after one. If it makes people think, imagine and question when I’m not even in the room, that’s a successful artwork to me.

You once described surveillance as something cold and impersonal. Yet somehow you found tenderness inside that system. Has David changed the way you think about being watched?

It’s changed how I feel about looking back.

Eight chapters and seven years is a significant part of an artist’s life. Where does Dear David sit within your work today?

Dear David started very ingloriously. I was throwing myself a pity party, as many artists do: ‘I have no studio, no gallery, no cameras, I can’t afford photographers or videographers’. Then one day on the tube I remembered David, and decided that if I didn’t have the resources, I’d use the state’s. The CCTV cameras, the lighting, the editing: it was everything I needed to perform and document. Fitting, since performance art uses reality as the canvas.

Today it’s the spine of my practice. All of it asks who owns an image of a woman’s body. In ‘Milking the Artist’, the market extracts from the body and sells it back. Here the state does the same thing for free, and doesn’t ask. Mine was being made and stored whether I consented or not, so I took it back. Well, a copy.

Dear David has been shown at the V&A as part of the Lumen Prize screening, and at HEK Basel. It’s strange to watch an institution frame work made from borrowed state cameras. The institution legitimises it, and collectors own it, but the original footage is still the state’s. I find that very funny.



Do you think you would make Dear David in the same way if you were starting it today?

No. Today, surveillance is too hot. Everyone’s complaining about it. I started this project back in 2019. It was a different conversation then. Plus, I live in New York City now, and in America you don’t have the rights to your footage. There is no David to fall in love with. There’s just a trio of young men who are your cute neighbours, and then you find out that they all work for Palantir.

What will you wear on your wedding day? What does a dress for a surveillance love story look like?

White, big, gorgeous. A garment that needs to be captured, with flash.

I’ve been collaborating with Viah Nitro, a Brooklyn designer. We met doing pull-ups at a park here in New York, and now we design adversarial fashion garments. It is my fourth collaboration with her, and the garments we’ve made together each respond to cameras in different ways. For instance, in a performance called ‘For Human Eyes Only’, the pattern in the dress hid my body from AI body-tracking surveillance algorithms.

The wedding dress goes the opposite way. A bride is the most looked-at woman in the room, dressed to be photographed and handed over, so this one is built to be seen. That’s Mulvey’s gaze, and it’s also the commodity: the white dress is a product, and the veil is the packaging.

The dress has its own surprise, so let’s just say, in this wedding dress OONA will dazzle.

There will be a surveillance-camera ring instead of a wedding ring. But is there anything about the ceremony that will be surprisingly traditional?

Vows, contracts, a bride in white on the most special day of her life.

Surveillance and marriage are, after all, both contracts that we enter into, so there will be many contractual elements to the performance. From the moment guests arrive, they will be required to sign a contract with me.

Will the real David be present?

Time will tell. He’ll be watching either way. He always is.

Do you think you’ll cry?

No one will be able to tell underneath my veil. After all, OONA’s veil is for being looked at constantly but never seen.

There’s a saying, too: no crying at the casino. And Live performances are always a gamble.

 

Are you nervous in the way you imagine someone might be nervous before an actual wedding?

At a normal wedding, nobody’s also the artwork. And I get nervous before every performance; I care how each one goes. I want it to be joyful, generative and approachable. In a good performance, the audience feels special, held, included. That isn’t easy to do. I hate artworks that tell me what to think, so I try to use humour as an invitation for the audience. I want people to laugh and I want to shine.

After the wedding, who is David to you? Do you think you and David will stay in touch once Dear David is over?

I think he might be my biggest fan. He is the one audience I have never had to market to.



What do you think you will miss most about writing to him?

The slowness. A letter makes you wait. A Handwritten letter is messier than a text but somehow more emotionally legible. And a love letter comes with the best audience there is: someone you assume wants to understand you, who cherishes you, where you can do no wrong. Words stand in for looking into each other’s eyes. But really, it’s just my own mind staring back at me on the page. 

Recently, I’ve been writing letters to someone, but never sending them. Maybe now that David is done, I will finally send a real love letter, to be read by only one set of eyes.



If David were actually waiting for you at the end of the aisle, would you still marry him?

I wouldn’t have a choice.

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